upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Just fired up my old laptop that has been sitting dormant for ages and hit pacman -Qi kernel26 to see when I last upgraded, 20 months ago, then hit pacman -Syu.

So far so good. It upgraded pacman first without incident, and once I moved the pacman.conf.pacnew to its proper place and ran pacman -Syu, it was just a question of hitting 'yes' a score of times on replacement packages and conflicting packages, before being faced with a choice to download some 600MB of new packages worth, requiring about 420MB additional space to be up to date.

Currently still downloading. Will post a few screenshots afterwards and let you know how it all went. It's interesting to see though, how much my xfce system has progressed since then. Think I'll start using it again as a test machine and backup.

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

b9anders: don't know the answer to your particular issue, but if you are going to upgrade from a very old system, I suggest reading throug the news entries to then as there will (regrettably) be some issues to sort out...

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

anokusa has the right of it. I basically just want to see if I can get it somewhat up and running after such a long time without upgrades (and also knowing there have been some fairly radical changes to how arch works since then).

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

radical changes...kernel26 to linuxbegin of the usr mergininitcpio aditions and changesmoduleconf (or whatever the name) remplaced by kmodnew base packages and new base-develsbig change in rc.confdeprecated of halbegin of udev2

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Well your arch setup seems fine, just that godam thing ... I mean that gdm thing is trouble.

If it were me, I'd cut gdm out of "the circuit" and boot to rl 3 and get gnome up and running via startx/xinit. If/when that's working there's only that one problem left with gdm. Solution: get rid of it ;o)

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Trilby wrote:

Well your arch setup seems fine, just that godam thing ... I mean that gdm thing is trouble.

If it were me, I'd cut gdm out of "the circuit" and boot to rl 3 and get gnome up and running via startx/xinit. If/when that's working there's only that one problem left with gdm. Solution: get rid of it ;o)

Or get rid of it, and reinstall just that, not the whole system.

Although it's more of a workaround for OP's issue, I have to agree. I use xinit/startx too, it's just much simpler and works just as well.

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

tomegun wrote:

b9anders: don't know the answer to your particular issue, but if you are going to upgrade from a very old system, I suggest reading throug the news entries to then as there will (regrettably) be some issues to sort out...

Running "pacman -S base base-devel --needed" would have been a good idea as well.

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Awebb wrote:

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.

I suppose another experiment could be to install one of the really, really early Arch ISOs in a VM and try to update it. I'm not even sure if it'd be possible, honestly. Too many drastically huge updates, probably.

Currently running Arch on a Samsung Chromebook Pro (dual booted with ChromeOS), and various VPSes and Docker containers.

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

iv597 wrote:

Awebb wrote:

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.

I suppose another experiment could be to install one of the really, really early Arch ISOs in a VM and try to update it. I'm not even sure if it'd be possible, honestly. Too many drastically huge updates, probably.

"Exercise left to the reader"

Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

. I bet you'll find your root partition at 100%. The filesystem applies a 'pad' to the declated filesystem sizes to ensure that the system doesn't get completely locked by entirely filling a partition (you can adjust the size by tuning your filesystem). Run as root, pacman will happily eat into this, X won't. Therefore, X can't write to the filesystem and so refuses to start.

It's the new packages in the pacman cache that do it.

This happens to me regularly. Either deleting old packages from the pacman cache or moving it to a partition with more space solves the issue.